


Spion Kop

by Artemis (Citrine)



Category: Raffles - E. W. Hornung
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, M/M, Non explicit slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-31
Updated: 2012-07-31
Packaged: 2017-11-11 03:04:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/473799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Citrine/pseuds/Artemis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I held his icy hand on the sun baked veldt until his fingers stiffened around mine.  </p><p>Set immediately after the end of EW Hornung's – The Knees of the Gods (contains spoilers if you haven't read the canon story).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Spion Kop

**Author's Note:**

> I always wanted to know what happened next and no one was telling me, so I ended up writing it myself. I hope you like it.

_I lay with closed ears and eyes.  My leg had come to life again, and the rest of me was numb._

_"Bunny!"_

_His voice sounded higher.  He must have been sitting upright._

_"Well?"_

_But it was not well with me; that was all I thought as my lips made the word._

_"It's not only been the best time I ever had, old Bunny, but I'm not half sure--"_

_Of what I can but guess; the sentence was not finished, and never could be in this world._

EW Hornung – The Knees of the Gods

 

I held his icy hand on the sun baked veldt until his fingers stiffened around mine.  I looked only once into his shattered face, only once to smooth his hair back from his ruined brow and to kiss his cold, grey lips. Then I curled down beside him and hid my face in the curve of his shoulder. I could smell the blood that drenched his uniform jacket and feel its sticky wetness under my cheek.  It is said that patience is a virtue and I, who had not been virtuous, waited patiently for death.

The fear of discovery came with the burnished shadows of evening, with the thunderous guns embalmed in silence and the movement of men among the dead and dying.  Only then did I do what I should have done in the burning heat of the day.  Raffles’ stiff fingers, once so nimble, had tied the bandage around my thigh and I struggled to unpick the tight knots with my left hand.  When I felt the blood run from my shattered leg to mingle with his on that hard, unforgiving earth I was finally at peace.

It is such a little thing, the moment between life and death and my moment was stolen from me.

I had hoped that we were well hidden in our trench of gritty earth, with the sharp, tall grasses all around, but a group of soldiers, sent out to search for survivors, stumbled across us.  They might have thought me as dead as I wished to be and moved on, but they did not.  Instead they clambered down the steep gully, down into our grave.

Raffles and I were still handfast. When they could not pry my hand from his death grip they broke his rigid fingers one by one.  I hated them for doing that to him.

I hate them still. 

That final, cold snap of bone haunts my darkest nightmares.  They took me away from him, to a white canvas hospital tent, where I lay for weeks in a heartbroken, morphine induced fog.  Then they shipped me back to England, with my discharge papers, a walking cane and a wound that would never heal.

Raffles will never come home. The dead of that day were buried on the battlefield, in an unmarked communal grave in the African dust. His name has long since been removed from the roll of honour at our old school and at Lords.  He died a hero, but there is nothing for England to remember him by now apart from my poor scribbling.

My scribbling kept the wolf from the door in the lonely years that followed, but I have always felt that I did not deserve my modest success.  For my heart does not lie in my lurid tales of mystery and adventure.  My heart lies with a dead villain in a foreign land.

I seldom dream of him, but when I do I wake in tears and the sweeter the dream the more bitter the awakening.

I go down downstairs then, to stand at my back door and smoke a cigarette, while the purple night fades into pale dawn. The world that we knew has passed into history. England has twice been engulfed by war and it is now a changed, mechanical land.

Attitudes have not changed.

But I am too old now for the photographs of him that adorn every room to raise more than an eyebrow among the curious. Those to have read my books sometimes come to ask me questions, but I will not speak of him, nor of the life we had together.  My unwelcome visitors admire my chocolate box cottage and the view across the valley and they say that I have been fortunate.  The young vicar of St David’s comes to drink my tea ration and borrow my copies of Dickens.  He once told me that my comfortable, peaceful life was a sign that God had forgiven me for all my sins.

He was wrong.

If God had forgiven me he would have let me die that day at Spion Kop.


End file.
